After the cows were killed, employees at Rancho Feeding Corp., based in Petaluma, California, would hide the warning signs of cancer by trimming off diseased parts, using a fake stamp of approval or even replacing the heads of sick cows with ones from healthy animals, the officials say.

A tip from an employee led to a federal investigation and the recall of nearly 9 million pounds of meat processed by Rancho.

My wine shopping and I have never had a problem. Just a perpetual race between the bankruptcy court and Hell.--Rogov

If this doesn't get consumers' attention to the atrocities of modern, industrialized meat production, then nothing will. I feel for the Nimans, due to the incredible value of their loss, but just because they were with their cattle during inspection and slaughter, doesn't mean they were there every step of the way during processing and packaging. If the employees of this packing plant were stooping to buying cancerous cattle and covering it up, what's to say they were above mislabeling or getting other animals mixed up in the lot? Plants like these process thousands of cattle a day; there is only so much quality control you can do with those kind of numbers.

Interestingly enough I am currently reading the book "Every Twelve Seconds" by Timothy Pachirat. He went undercover in a slaughterhouse in Omaha, NE (my hometown) as part of his doctoral thesis. This is more of a social science look into the roles of workers and the "politics of sight", as the he puts it, rather than an exposé on inhumane conditions for animals (although he touches on that topic). There is a clip from an interview with Evan Kliemann from the Good Food radio show, if anyone is interested in hearing more: http://blogs.kcrw.com/goodfood/2014/03/navigating-meat-morality-in-the-world-of-industrialized-meat-production/.

I'm not advocating this for everyone. I decided to go meat-free a couple of years ago for many of the reasons mentioned in these articles - a combination of health and humaneness and the environment and more - but I don't evangelize. I do think the closing lines of the linked article are worth re-stating, though:

... if the result of a worldwide shift to a plant-based diet sounds like a right-winger's worst nightmare, it's worth pointing out that continuing to eat as much meat as we currently do promises to result in a left-winger's worst nightmare: In a world of untrammeled global warming, where disastrous weather events are routine, global conflicts will increase, only the wealthy will thrive, and the poor will suffer.

Let's try a middle path. We're not all going to become vegetarians, but most of us can stop giving our money to factory farms—the biggest and worst offenders, from a pollution and public health perspective. We can eat less meat than we currently do, especially meat from methane-releasing ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats, etc.). Just because a sudden global conversion to vegetarianism would have jarring effects doesn't mean we can't gradually reduce our consumption of meat, giving the market time to adjust. We not only can; we must. After all, with the world's population slated to grow to 9 billion by 2050, we'll be needing to take some of the 25 percent of the world's land area back from the cows.